With identity theft and data security breach incidents on the rise in today's digital age, data (information) security is a major concern for individuals and organizations. Generally speaking, most conventional data security systems are designed using either an asymmetric key-based infrastructure (alternatively known as a public-private key-based (PPK) infrastructure), or a symmetric key-based infrastructure. To prevent data loss, however, these systems often compromise usability for security. For example, it is very difficult to search encrypted data using unencrypted search terms because traditionally the data must be decrypted before the search can be conducted. This decryption takes time and is computationally draining and inefficient, as each piece of data to be searched must be decrypted. Further, many such searches are not even possible in conventional systems as a given user may not have the appropriate authority to decrypt certain data. Thus, certain data to be searched will either not be surfaced to the user or, worse, may be provided to the user without proper authorization. These difficulties are only exacerbated by encryption-at-rest systems that only decrypt the original data in limited circumstances when proper authorization has been verified, which means that a search of the original data using unencrypted search terms is currently impossible.
Therefore, there is a long-felt but unresolved need for a system or method that permits querying encrypted data in a cryptographically-secure manner.